[En] On the 24th of February 2004, heavy machinery entered an empty industrial plot in Barcelona occupied by some sixty Gypsy families. Over a few days two diggers drilled and lifted up the concrete floor of the site, intimidating the Gypsies and finally pushing them out. They left behind a contorted surface, like a horizontal wall, to protect the site and keep it empty. This method of dissuasion demonstrates the economic value of violence and destruction in order to control space. The broken ground, the fissures and fragments of concrete slabs standing up like remnants of ancient Mayan stelae give testimony, still today, of this displacement.

To that extent, Lovecraft’s failure to engage in the linguistic experimentation of his high Modernist contemporaries does not make him some kind of recalcitrant provincial, but rather a sensible (if xenophobic) voyager who simply did not want to make the claim that language was all there was. Lovecraft’s language “fails” only insofar as the narrators fail to get into words, to journalize, some experience that simply cannot be fully available to the meager human senses and mind. For the most part, Lovecraft is happy to use language as a simple, functional tool, rather than to insist at every moment through linguistic estrangement — like, say, a Stein or a Beckett — that language is not what you think it is (and, consequently, that language is everything). For Lovecraft, it’s the universe, not language, that is not what you think it is. So what is it then? Well, weird.

Harman, for all of his concern with objects (his branch of speculative realism has been christened “object-oriented ontology”), is not a materialist, and he’s certainly no empiricist. He believes that scientific pursuits that seek the elemental building blocks of the universe are getting most of the story wrong, for though we might be able to learn of the subatomic composition of, say, uranium, the banana or the West Nile virus, none of that knowledge exhausts the ways that an object can affect reality — which is to say, the way objects can relate to each other. An idiosyncratic feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of availability to human perception or “science.

So while there are lots of luscious details in these short sections of Watch Dogs: from the satirical take on the opening of a clichéd media arts exhibition through to the mis-en-scene being delicately traced with the digital exhausts of the city’s populace, the key thing for me comes in another preview video for Watch Dogs featuring a voiceover from the game’s creative director.

He says:

“Everything you’re about to see is Just another day in the city. There is no mission and no objectives … You’re creating your own experience by tapping into peoples’ lives. What’s cool about it, is that the possibilities are endless.”

That’s it. No Mission, no objectives. But the endless possibility of the city generates the experience. Just as with a real city, essentially, albeit in rather different ways.

Of course, this being a game, there is a plot. And the main protagonist has “super-powers” that are not really that “super” at all, but a gentle extrapolation of today’s consumer tech, in which he can access any digitally-mediated infrastructure in the immediate vicinity.

“You’re going to control the entire city of Chicago …”, says the art director, noting how you can access and redeploy any infrastructure lying around, from ATMs to air-conditioning units, traffic lights to bollards. And then, this being a game, he says “Even the smallest thing can become a weapon.”

But while the idea of hacking the city’s tech clearly presents strong narrative possibilities, it looks like Watch Dogs will be enjoyed on a whole other level: that no-narrative narrative of the city unfolding itself for you.

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.[1] The resulting world may be called a constructed world. The term “worldbuilding” was popularized at science fiction writers’ workshops in the 1970s.[citation needed] Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.[2] Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world. Constructed worlds can enrich the backstory and history of fictional works, and it is not uncommon for authors to revise their constructed worlds while completing its associated work. Constructed worlds can be created for personal amusement and mental exercise, or for specific creative endeavors such as novels, video games, or role-playing games.

An open world is a type of video game level design where a player can roam freely through a virtual world and is given considerable freedom in choosing how or when to approach objectives.[1] The term “free roam” is also used, as is “sandbox” and “free-roaming”.[2][3] “Open world” and “free-roaming” suggest the absence of artificial barriers,[4] in contrast to the invisible walls and loading screens that are common in linear level designs. An “open world” game does not necessarily imply a sandbox. In a true “sandbox”, the player has tools to modify the world themselves and create how they play.[5] Generally open world games still enforce some restrictions in the game environment, either due to absolute technical limitations or in-game limitations (such as locked areas) imposed by a game’s linearity.